Repeating spatiotemporal spike patterns exist and carry information. How this information is extracted by downstream neurons is unclear. Here we theoretically investigate to what extent a single cell could detect a given spike pattern and what the optimal parameters to do so are, in particular the membrane time constant τ. Using a leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neuron with homogeneous Poisson input, we computed this optimum analytically. We found that a relatively small τ (at most a few tens of… CONTINUE READING